Members of South Norfolk Council’s planning committee voted unanimously to grant permission for the Masterplan for the Norwich Research Park North development.

This could create more than 5,000 future jobs, include new flagship buildings and upgrades to the park’s IT infrastructure and road network and create a total of 65,000 square metres of new commercial space for research and development.

In 2011, the government awarded the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) £26m to invest in Norwich Research Park to deliver innovation from the research base and generate economic growth and job creation.

Project Director for Norwich Research Park, Alan Giles, said: “The Masterplan is our road map for the next fifteen years and beyond to provide the infrastructure for expansion.

“We are determined that by 2030 Norwich Research Park will be a pre-eminent international research and innovation Park focused on crops, food, health, genomics and environmental sciences.”

The development area will include the John Innes Centre site (also encompassing research institutes The Sainsbury Laboratory and The Genome Analysis Centre), Institute of Food Research site and the University of East Anglia triangle site.

Norwich Research park, on Colney Lane, is a partnership between the University of East Anglia, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the John Innes Centre, Institute of Food Research, The Genome Analysis Centre and The Sainsbury Laboratory linked to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

For more on this story and what it means for Norwich see tomorrow’s paper.